Teachers to get vaccine as school year ends
Experts insisting that in-person school staff should get higher priority
Ontario’s teachers will likely have to wait until June to receive their shot at protection against COVID-19.
As part of its Phase 2 rollout released Friday, the Ford government has decreed that, by and large, it’s sticking with its strategy to vaccinate those in older age groups first and hot spots second, while relegating teachers, as well as other first responders, to the back of this most current lineup.
“School staff,” the plan says, at both elementary and secondary levels, which presumably includes teachers, join firefighters, police, special constables, foster care workers, manufacturers, farm workers and funeral workers, in a new group called “Cannot work from home.” These roughly 2.5 million people are slated to be vaccinated according to the plan, just before Phase 3.
That, the plan says, “will keep workers safe and protect essential services.”
Retired Gen. Rick Hillier, head of Ontario’s vaccine task force, said at a news conferene Friday that the province is aiming to complete a first round of COVID-19 vaccinations by June 20 for “every eligible person who wants it.”
Since early January, experts around the world, as well as U.S. President Joe Biden, and Ontario’s teachers unions, have decreed that teachers, as well as education workers, who likewise come into contact with students every day, should get priority for the vaccine.
“Teachers are at high risk,” Brenda Coleman, clinical scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital and assistant professor at Dalla Lana school of Public Health, told the Star. “Teachers are essential workers that should be looked at ... they are highly exposed on a daily basis.”
As well, she says, there is a lot of public pressure for kids to be in school in person and on teachers to deliver instruction face to face. For some time, Coleman says, people didn’t believe kids were carrying COVID or were capable of transmitting it. But, she says, that’s not the case. Not only can they get it, but they can give it, even if they have mild or no symptoms.
To date, teachers have been understudied in the public health literature, she says, and that is why she answered a government call last fall to investigate the risk of COVID in education workers.
Coleman is just beginning a yearlong study, the first of its kind in Canada, of more than 7,000 education workers, including teachers, support staff and school caretakers — anyone who comes into contact with students during the school day — to better understand their rates of infection, not only in COVID, but also in influenza and in about 100 different viruses that lead to the common cold, as well as to determine their risk factors for getting sick. The study will also look at their mental distress.
But, while Coleman hopes her study will be able to make important recommendations on the health implications of class size, personal protective equipment (PPE) and the need to vaccinate urgently, her results won’t be ready for some time. Yet, she says, policy-makers must decide now about whether and when to make teachers as well as other groups in society a priority.
Amid Ontario’s slow and fraught vaccine rollout, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, which represents teachers across the province, has, since January, been calling on the government to implement additional protections for students and staff, including better ventilation, reduced class sizes, access to asymptomatic testing, better PPE and priority to receive the vaccine in line with other front-line workers.
“Despite the increased risk of transmission highlighted by the government’s own data, the government has yet to implement additional protections for students, educators and other staff currently working in schools,” Sam Hammond, ETFO president wrote in an open letter to Education Minister Stephen Lecce on Jan. 19. “Educators will continue to do all they can to support students and their families. We need you to do your part.”
The Toronto District School board has recently announced that it will be putting air filtration machines in schools that need it as vaccine rollout across the province has been slow and problematic.
Even though it seems like a no-brainer to vaccinate the people who are dutifully leaving their homes each day to care for and teach the province’s young, it is unclear what is motivating policy-makers to be moving in that direction. Or, if they are relying on data collected by Ontario’s Ministry of Education. Publicly available statistics on positive COVID cases in schools are nothing if not confusing.
A quick parsing of the data reveals that about 1.4 per cent of the just more than 9,000 positive cases in schools to date have infected Ontario’s roughly 128,000 education workers and 7,000 administrators. That may seem low given that about 2.1 per cent of the general population has tested positive for COVID to date, and, according to data released in late February by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, about 1.8 per cent of front-line healthcare workers, including doctors and nurses, have tested positive.
But the school data is incomplete and misleading. About 13 per cent of positive COVID cases reported by school boards to the Ministry of Education have been classified as “unspecified,” meaning it is unclear whether the infected person is a student or a staff member. Further, the publicly available data does not discern any categories within “staff,” which includes just about every adult that works in a school, including teachers, office and maintenance workers as well as education workers who spend their days in the presence of highrisk and special-needs children.
John Weatherup, president of CUPE Local 4400, which represents about 17,000 education workers in Toronto, calls the current data useless and misleading and says it can’t be used right now in any “meaningful way.” Data, he says, only becomes useful after the fact, months or years down the road, when it can be properly contextualized. When a case of COVID is discovered in a school there is no telling how it will impact all other members of the school and the community at large. “You could have a couple of cases that could then impact hundreds of families with sick leaves and parents’ abilities to take care of their children.”
Weatherup says that numbers are only a small part of the decision-making process, which should focus on the relationship between COVID and the people who have it and how that impacts schools, children, parents, economics and other aspects of society.
Coleman’s study will help for the next viral outbreak. Right now, she is in the process of trying to attract participants through tweets and emails, and reaching out to teachers unions across the province. Going through official channels — to every school board and principal in the province to get their sign off in order for teachers to participate, she says, is logistically impossible.